


Eurovision, Y 91

by orphan_account



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Eurovision in the post apocalypse, Other, Reynir's family - Freeform, You Can't Go Home Again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-05
Updated: 2017-01-05
Packaged: 2018-09-15 00:28:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9211769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Reynir goes home for Eurovision and struggles with things, like independence and emotions and an acerbic grandfather





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Unlos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unlos/gifts).



> So unfortunately being the disorganised mess of a person I am, I've only half-finished my piece of the exchange for the lovely Unlos. I'll upload this as the first chapter of a two-chapter piece, and the last half will be finished and posted after I get back from New Zealand. Wish me luck, because my return flight is on Friday the 13th

The tradition is so old in Reynir’s family that his oldest brother, Olafur, cannot even remember when it began. 

“Which is strange to think about,” says Olafur as he helps the radio operator push his massive unit to the front of the town hall “Because that means Grandpa Ragnar might have done the same thing we’re doing- can you get her off my leg please- except it would have only been Icelandic at that point. How weird would that be? Eurovision with just the Icelanders, competing to see who could sing a runo the loudest- Ruomhilde, young lady, that cat is not your chew toy- and I don’t even know how they would have decided who was competing against who. Did the participants compete for different cities or neighbourhoods or what? At any rate, I’m glad we’ve got an international Eurovision again. It’s called ‘Eurovision’, not ‘Icelanders from slightly different places try to one-up each other’. Thanks, I’ll take her back now. No, not that one, hold onto that one.”

Reynir hands over the youngest of his nieces (of which there are now three) and pops the other more securely on his hip “Are you sure I can’t do anything to help?”

Olafur shakes his head emphatically, looking quite grim as his five-year-old tugs on the braids in his beard “I think you’ve done more than enough to help this year.”

“Help who? The Known World, or our parents to realise that I’m not gonna be happy sitting on my ass surrounded by sheep for the rest of my life?”

In spite of himself, Olafur smiles “Don’t talk like that in front of my girls.” And then he is off to be useful, leaving Reynir stranded on the sidelines with an increasingly squirrely niece and bruised pride.

Reynir has only been back in Iceland for a week and has already been demoted from an ‘explorer of the Silent World’ to ‘baby of the family who needs to be reminded that he is only the baby of the family’. It is amazing how quickly his family managed to strip away his new independence, and simply by not allowing him to do anything for himself. They have all gathered for the occasion. Everyone from Olafur and his three daughters to Hildur and her pet lizard. What luck that Eurovision should coincide with the few weeks of leave Reynir is taking from his work in Dalsnes. Nothing like a family holiday to remind Reynir that he belongs in Iceland with his loving family, his loving sheep, doing nothing at all but attending to only those two things for the rest of his life. if it were not for the weight of his family’s Eurovision tradition, he would not be in Iceland at all. 

But since the family’s founding, practically, there has been a tradition of gathering from the far corners of the Known World where they are scattered around the year, of piling into the ancestral farmhouse and later into the town hall. Used to be a small gathering; neither of his parents have any siblings, so were content to sit in a relatively small group with their four children and Grandpa Ragnar. The family circle has slowly expanded; Olafur and his girlfriend have three daughters to bring, as well as the girlfriend’s widowed aunt and an uncle who is widely rumoured to have svartalf blood somewhere in his lineage. Bjarni has apparently not yet found out how to effectively utilise birth-control with his girlfriend of the week, because every now and then he will contact their parents from his (safe) desk job in Mora to inform them of another grandchild.  
For some reason Bjarni has a habit of picking women who are determined to be mothers right up until the child exits the womb, whom they are then equally determined to pass to him and never have a thing to do with again. Thusly he has six kids running around here somewhere, the oldest of whom is only five years Reynir’s junior. 

Gudrun had a pair of twins with her husband only two years ago and called it good- meaning that she swore she would never go through the pain of childbirth again, going as far as to have her uterus removed.  
Hildur brings no one new to the family gathering and she never will, in terms of romantic partners. She swears she plans to come out as aromantic to their parents every time the topic arises in her letters to Reynir, but seems further and further from it each time she returns home. In the place of a spouse or partner, she brings her pet lizard, an enormous komodo dragon who is always dressed in specially tailored sweaters and boots to protect him from the cold, and who will actually answer to his name of ‘ Haruki Murakami’ (Hildur’s favourite pre-Rash writer) if you say it in a high-pitched voice. 

“What’s an ass?” asks Swanhilde, the middle child among his nieces from Olafur.

“It’s what you sit on. It’s also another word for ‘donkey’.”

“What’s a donkey?”

Reynir sets her down and gives her a gentle nudge towards her father’s receding back “Why don’t you go ask your daddy?”

She hardly needs encouragement. Off like a shot out of a cannon, and a moment later tackling the back of Olafur’s legs. Reynir has already slipped away and blended into the crowd clearing out the chairs. He feels a pang of regret at sending his little niece away. Really, he should be happy to sit her on his knee and fill her ears with (heavily sanitised) tales of the Silent World. He loved hearing his siblings’ stories when he was her age. But if Reynir does consent to act as the baby-sitter, he does not doubt that he will soon be saddled with all of the kids for the duration of his trip, to keep him busy, to draw him back into the rhythm of a family life. From there it will be easy for his parents to use the guilt as leverage to keep him at home.  
Back with his sheep. Back in the room he was born in, grew up in, brought his first girlfriend back to, then later a boyfriend and later no one, where he used to dream of a world outside of his own and scheme up ways to make his escape into it. The room he sneaked out of on the night he finally left Iceland. 

As he was telling Tuuri over the radio, shortly before leaving Dalsnes: “I’ve been gone for over a year. I’ve learned to use my magic, fight trolls, I’ve become the second favourite of a self-described madwoman, learned basic Norwegian and Finnish, I’ve arm-wrestled a Danish farm-boy and won, and I guarantee you, all of that stuff is going to go out the window the moment I sit down on my old bed. I’ll be a twenty-year old goober again with as much experience of the outside world as a fish has of the banks outside its pond.”

To which Tuuri said “Ok, I’ll advise two things here. One, go have some herbal tea and just chill out for a minute. Two, if you think you’re about to revert into your previous, gooberish self, then just find a reflective surface. Look at that scar on your forehead. That proves that you’ve been in the outside world.”

“It’s not exactly a battle scar, Tuuri.”

“Well pretend it is. Pretend it didn’t come from tripping over a rake…um, how about you say you got it saving some orphans from an infected Siberian tiger? That’ll go over well.”

“Do I have to tell everyone that, or just myself?”

“Yourself. No one else will believe it. The last time an infected Siberian tiger cropped up in the mainland, I was still in pigtails.”

Reynir puts his head down and joins the work silently, moving chairs and tables to the side. As he moves the chairs, no one speaks to him and any eye-contact is quickly broken off. The centre of the room must be cleared to make room for the families that will gather here shortly. He is surprised at the amount of shifting that needs to be done, considering how small the population of the town is. If the townspeople stood closely together it is likely they could all fit on the palm of a small Jotun. A tight-knit community. Everyone knows everybody else, and everybody certainly knows Reynir. He made quite the stir when he caught the carriage out of town without warning, and the next that anyone heard of him was a hail on the town’s radio from the Åsa’s ship to inform his parents he was in deepest, sickest Denmark with a scholarly expedition.  
Reynir figured out on the first day that he was resented for the way he left the town: at only twenty-one Reynir can do basically anything and everything that it is his whim to do. They resent that he did not leave the way that is typically expected; by joining the army or navy, by marrying into a family outside of the town, by winning a scholarship or receiving a job offer in another city. Reynir took it upon himself to break tradition, along with his parents’ hearts, and suddenly launched himself into a position of infamy and relative prestige. With what they perceive as minimal effort on his part (after all, all he had to do was sit in the back of the Tank while the immunes did all the grunt work) he opened most of the Known World to him. 

Reynir will not stay in his home-town for long. Just long enough to hear Eurovision with his family, make an uneasy peace with his parents, then he’ll high-tail it back to Dalsnes. It is still the same tight-knit community that he remembers, here. He is simply no longer welcome. 

Before he can really start to dwell on this, Hildur finds him, staggering under the weight of the packages of food and drink.

“Help.” she orders in a squeak.

Reynir takes some of the packages and searches for Haruki Murakami.

“I told him to keep Grandpa company. Why don’t you go keep Grandpa company? I think he wants to talk to you.”

Reynir recognises his dismissal and accepts it gracefully. Better to sulk on the sidelines than make a spectacle of himself on stage…whatever that might mean. Grandpa Ragnar is planted in his wicker chair in the family’s spot. The chair was brought specially for him all the way from the house, because if he doesn’t have it, he will assume the electric chair position for however long he is required to be sitting. Personally Reynir would rather allow Grandpa Ragnar to do the electric chair- few people of the advanced age of Grandpa Ragnar have such mighty core muscles, and it would seem to Reynir that they should support this habit of his rather than schlepp his wicker chair after him.  
As is normal for Grandpa Ragnar, he stares off into space with an expression that suggests he has just come home to find his entire family murdered and would very much like to take revenge upon the person/people who did it. Reynir has never known his Grandpa to wear a tender expression, even when holding kittens. Some people’s faces are simply not designed to hold joy or softness. 

Still, Haruki Murakami has made himself quite comfortable in Grandpa Ragnar’s lap.

“Hello Grandpa,” Reynir lays the packages in a stack on their blanket and leans over to kiss his grandpa on the cheek “Are you comfortable?”

“Hello Reynir.” mutters the old man “I am quite comfortable, thank you, except there seems to be a gigantic lizard in my lap.”

“Oh that’s just Haruki Murakami. You know, Hildur’s-”

“Hildur’s substitute for a human relationship. I know exactly who he is. You misunderstand me, grandson. I didn’t bring up the lizard because I’m a feeble-minded old fart who can’t remember his own family. I brought him up because I don’t want the blasted lizard sitting on my gallbladder for the rest of the evening. Remove him.”

Obediently, Reynir scoops the lizard off his lap. Haruki Murakami makes himself comfortable by burrowing into Reynir’s clothes- as far as he can, anyway, considering he is approximately the size of a sheepdog so his bottom half sticks out of the hem of Reynir’s sweater. With a lizard up his sweater and a grumpy grandpa in need of conversation, Reynir decides he is better off staying on the blanket. No sooner than he has settled at his grandpa’s side does Gudrun zoom in with a twin tucked under each arm.

“Sit with Uncle Reynir,” she plonks them on either side of Reynir “And Grandpa Ragnar until the radio comes on, alright? If you behave yourselves like civilised human beings then maybe I won’t make you work on Grandfather and Grandmother’s farm this summer.” she’s off before either of her boys can complain.

The red-head of the two, Natan, looks beseechingly up at Reynir “We won’t have to work on the farm, will we?”

“We wanna go with Mom this summer,” adds the brunette, Starri “We wanna go burn stuff.”

“Your Mom blows up stuff.” Reynir pats his nephews on the head “And anyway, you wouldn’t enjoy it. Blowing up stuff is no fun because you get showered with troll bits and your ears ring all day.”

“But you got to blow up stuff.”

“Yeah, and you had a lot of fun, right?”

Reynir chews on his bottom lip “Um, I guess you could call it fun. But mostly it was blank terror, fighting trolls.”

“But you made a lot of friends.”

“Yeah, you don’t tell your sheep about your troubles anymore, Mom says, because you’ve finally discovered the value of human contact.”

Grandpa Ragnar says: “Breeder incoming.” and Bjarni has thrust the newest of his brood into Reynir’s arms.  
“Hold her for a second, please,” he jogs off to the front of the room, where Hildur is trying to get the radio to the right station by whacking it and swearing at it.

Grandpa Ragnar squints at the burbling baby in Reynir’s hands “Which one is that? By the gods, is that a new one?”

“No, Grandpa, where would he get a new one inside a week? This is Rúna. You know her. You were holding her last night-”

The baby is lifted from him and popped on Grandpa Ragnar’s knee to be bounced “I know that. I also know that I can’t tell a damn one of these children apart. Babies all look the same when they’re babies. This one looks exactly as much like a potato as the rest of your tom-cat brother’s bunch.”

Natan reaches out with grabby hands “Can I hold her?”

“You may not.”

“Why not?”

“Because I am holding her and we are bonding. Aren’t we, Rúna?”

Rúna dribbles happily down her front. 

Slowly but surely, the rest of the family join them. Olafur herds his daughters to the blankets and keeps reins in their restlessness by letting them braid and re-braid his beard. Reynir’s mother comes into the hall with apologies for her lateness and the excuse that the dogs needed to be rounded up and shut up in the barn for the night. Reynir’s father joins them five minutes later with a story about one of the rams breaking loose of the enclosure and helping himself to the winter store- they’re going to need to bake some more bread, adding that he has never known a ram or a sheep of any kind to eat bread before. Bjarni comes along looking like a papa polar bear covered in his children and distributes them wherever he can; at one point Reynir winds up with two of the younger ones on a knee each, and Starri on his back because Starri has decided the acoustics are better on top of his uncle’s head. Finally, Hildur and Gudrun are back, the hall is cleared, and the crowds are settling down on their own blankets. 

As the food is opened and passed around, Haruki Murakami reappears to claim his fair share of the meal. He does everything from beg neatly for scraps to tugging sandwiches out of the hands of the smaller children. Reynir ends up between his two sisters, his lap emptied of niblings. 

“There’s a lot of kids this year.” he remarks neutrally.

“Too damn many,” says Grandpa Ragnar, still bouncing a happy Rúna on his ancient knee “Bjarni wants a neutering, I think. Damned irresponsible to let a man that fertile run around the dating pool.”

“Grandpa!” Bjarni flushes red “Please, not in front of my kids.”

“Feh! There’s so many of them I couldn’t say a thing tonight without it being in front of one of them.”

“Who wants some hardfiskur? Or saltfiskur?” Reynir’s mother starts to pass out pieces of each meat.

As Gudrun accepts a long strip of meat, her eyes fog over “You know, this reminds me of that time in Hitra, when I was on the cleansing effort.”

“Oh here we go,” Gudrun’s husband rolls his eyes “Hon, no gore, please, you’ll put everyone off their meals-”

Gudrun makes a dramatic gesture with her saltfiskur “There we were, twelve strong, the oldest of us only a dainty twenty. Our more experienced leader had been killed in a freak orca accident, and her right-hand man had died trying to rescue her. It was messy. And I mean, gods, was it messy. There were organs everywhere.”

“Oh no, the Eliasons have brought skata. Can you believe the nerve, with this many people so closely together? Dear gods, spare our olfactory senses.” Reynir’s father grimaces with the air of long-suffering that only a man with thirteen grand-children can manage.

“And we had no weapons! No weapons at all! This was our truly terrible mistake, you see, for we had only brought along blades. Our leader was one of those traditionalists who said anything but a knife was a sin against the gods to use, so we all had to make do with these daggers not much bigger than those eensy knives the Finns like so much. What are they called, Reynir?”

“A pukko. And they’re pretty powerful-”

“Oh my gods the smell! I really can’t stand it. And look at them, shamelessly drinking their Black Death with children about. I’m going to go over there and-”  
Reynir’s father is pulled by his belt into Reynir’s mother’s lap, where he can make no trouble, and fed mollifying pieces of cake.

“Yes, a pukko. Anyway, to begin with we had knives not much bigger than those silly back-scratchers and nearly no experience between us, then we had to go and lose all of our knives. So do you know what we did?”

Natan hoots in excitement “I know! I know! You lit a fire in the infected orca’s corpse and climbed inside, then when all the trolls came, you fought them with the orca’s ribs!”

“Are you gonna let me tell the story?”

“Please, don’t let her tell the story,” says Grandpa Ragnar as he feeds Rúna a piece of sweet potato “I’ve heard it more times than I’ve had hot dinners.”

Gudrun frowns at him “What? It’s a great story!”

“It’s a disgusting story-”

“Yes, yes, Anja, the music is coming on soon.” Bjarni corks a bun in his daughter’s mouth before she can start to whine in earnest.

And so goes the conversation for a half hour. Reynir is at first fine, sandwiched between his sisters and surrounded by his thirteen niblings, feeling loved and cared for and cozened in a special world of his family’s making. He starts to get a little drowsy. He wishes for his bed, though he is still enjoying himself. He has just started to think about where he should take the sheep out to graze tomorrow morning when he catches sight of himself in his glass of water, and of his scar.

“The music’s starting! Finally!”

Reynir thinks of tigers as the first and most predictable act starts; the United Sami Nation has selected one of their younger mages to do a yoik. It’s a nice, traditional start to the Eurovision, and so soothing that no one has pointed out to the United Sami Nation that they’ve been doing yoiks for the last fifteen years. 

“Didn’t this girl sing last year?” asks the svartalf uncle.

“This is a boy.” insists the widowed aunt “And we’ve never heard him before.”

“I want some saltfiskur.”

“Anja, you’re holding a piece.”

“I want the piece you’ve got.”

“Shush! I can’t hear the music!”

“Hildur, control your lizard. He’s got his face in the buns.”

Reynir does not hear much of the yoik over the chatter. It is generally accepted in the town hall that only an average of two acts will be heard by each person, due to the sheer amount of whining and demanding and other suchlike noises that issue from each family group. The point of Eurovision is not to hear the music, but rather, to sit in a crowded hall over-heating from too many people’s body-heat and eat often pungent delicacies with the nearest and dearest in your life.  
Reynir finds himself wishing he was back in Dalsnes. Guiltily, he thinks how much more pleasant Eurovision might be if he were listening to it with Sigrun and Emil, with only a few biscuits and a pot of tea between them. Tuuri mentioned Eurovision as a quiet event in her family, something to be played in the background while she, Lalli and Onni work quietly. Lalli will be sewing, Tuuri will be making notes on one of the texts from the Silent World and Onni will be doing whatever it is he does to contribute to the household. Napping, probably. 

At least Mikkel is a partner in his suffering. From Mikkel’s tales of Eurovisions past, the Madsens do it with as much vigour and vim as Reynir’s folks. Possibly more, because they all gather in a relatively isolated barn to listen, and so can misbehave as much as they want to without incurring the wrath of neighbours.

While Reynir ruminates and sulks, Swanhilde crawls into his lap and showers him with gristly crumbs from her hardfiskur. He twists the end of his braid absently between his fingers, thinking of tigers and sheep.

“Oh, here comes Pakistan!” crows Gudrun. She feigns no loyalty to Iceland at Eurovision; her favourite songs are the folk songs from Keuruu’s Little Karachi.

Reynir’s father makes his second attempt at a complaint about the skata “Really, the smell is unbearable.”   
And again he is pulled into his wife’s lap. This time she gives him a shortbread cookie to chew on. 

“Uncle Reynir.”

He looks down at Swanhilde.

“Are you gonna eat anything?”

“I’m not really hungry, sweetie.”

She gives him a pitying smile “Me either. You’re s’posed to eat ‘til you explode, though.” she jams a cookie in his mouth.

As Pakistan’s song ends and the number for Sweden is lined up, Reynir’s stomach turns alarmingly. He has happened to look at the box of hardfiskur, just for something to rest his eyes on, and now cannot stop thinking about how similar the texture of it is to the raw, reddish texture of human muscle tissue. It looks to him like Sigrun’s arm after she took the troll bite for him. Like his father somehow mixed up dishes while packing for Eurovision, and placed Sigrun’s arm in the box. A platter of untouched hardfiskur awaits them in the kitchen at home. 

“ABBA again. Shameless.”

“I happen to enjoy ABBA very much, Hildur. This is practically my only chance to listen to them anyway. You can hardly find a working record player these days, let alone a record that hasn’t been scratched beyond use.”

“Let’s be grateful it’s not ‘Dancing Queen’ again. Someone take this infant off my knee. Gods, is she a fat one. Bjarni, you’re feeding her too much.”

Reynir nudges Swanhilde out of his lap and stands, his legs protesting at the rush of blood with pins and needles and a cramp in his calf.

“Where are you going?” asks his mother sharply.

He gestures to the door “I need fresh air. For just a moment. I’ll be back in soon.”

“Uncle Reynir hates ABBA.” notes Starri.

“Can I come too?” asks Natan, but he is stopped by his mother.

Reynir emerges into the brisk night with a vice-like sensation in his chest. Something is drawn tight, to the point of snapping. The town is dark without its people. The only lights on anymore will be for those too sick to leave their houses, or the few who boycott Eurovision on the grounds of it being a useless frivolity. These lights are chinks of butter-coloured candles in a blanket of night. Overhead, an arm of the Milky Way unfurls; a sleeper stretching out for something unseen. 

“Reynir?”

He went around the side of the building and crouched in the shadows in the hopes his family would not find him if they followed him, but Hildur has found him anyway. She joins him in the cool shadow of the town hall and sits on her haunches, staring up at the sky.

“It’s hard to come back home.” he says.

She lays a hand on his shoulder “Isn’t it?” 

“Everything is the same. Or it’s changed, but it’s changed in a way that makes it even more the same than it was before.”

“I know.”

He wrings the end of his braid “Home is supposed to be the place where you come to hide away from the world…it’s not supposed to feel like a hell all its own, is it?”

“Reynir, if I’ve learned one thing from our family and our house, it’s that you can’t rely on Mom and Dad for your happiness. Just for your safety. They want you to be safe, and they don’t care about the rest, really. It’s damned selfish and annoying of them. But it is what it is.”

Reynir is silent for a long moment, then he bursts out “Maybe they’ll treat me like an adult if I come back with a kid!”

Hildur snorts, then doubles over laughing “You don’t even have a vagina!”

“I used to! Watch, I’ll bring it back with my magic, then I’ll get knocked up and hand them over a grandchild. Instant adult! It worked for Bjarni.”

“The Hel it did.” Hildur wipes her eyes on her sleeve “Oh, Reynir, you don’t have to prove anything to Mom and Dad. They’ll accept it in their own time. Just enjoy your life.”

He puts his back to the wall with a groan “But it’s just a series of milestones, isn’t it? First I become an adult in their eyes. Then I get pressured to bring home a good man, woman, whatever, then to marry them and procreate. And if I don’t raise my kids right, gods help me. Then I’ll do the same to my kids and before you know it, I’ll be where Grandpa Ragnar is.”

“Revered and beloved?”

“And old and bitter.”

“That’s a real over-simplification of life, Reynir. Don’t you think something fun might happen along the way?”

He shrugs “Something terrifying, with my luck.”

Hildur tilts her head and rests her chin on her knees “You mean the luck that landed you on the first expedition into the Silent World? And the luck that brought out your magic, and made you a mage? And what about the luck that brought you through all that alive, with good friends and a career to show for it? Are we talking about that luck?”

Reynir grunts.

“I won’t lecture you. Just know that there’s more in the world for you than you think. Most of it isn’t here at home. Most of it is out there in the world. You’ll bring a little more back with you every time you come back to the farm, and someday Mom and Dad will realise you’re not their baby anymore.” she ruffles his hair fondly, adding with a grin “But you’ll always be my baby brother.”

“I can live with that.”

“Good. Should we go back inside?”

Reynir shakes his head “I want to stay out here for a little while longer. Maybe ten minutes.”

“The stars are awesome tonight.” admits Hildur.

“And the smell of that skata was awful.”

Hildur laughs her loud belly laugh again, and for the first time that night, Reynir can’t resist joining in.


End file.
